In the hours after the announcement we posted some early thoughts on the fundamentals of Instant and the changes you can expect to see in the near term. With much of the conjecture about the impact Instant will have, both on the way we will search and on the SEO profession continuing in the week following the announcement, we crunched the data to see what impact, if any Instant was having on searcher behavior.

We analyzed the search traffic for ten high traffic websites across multiple verticals for the week prior to Google Instant and compared it to the week immediately following the launch. We looked at more than 880,000 visits, 440,000 per week, and grouped the traffic into length of search term.

As you can see below, the distribution of traffic is virtually identical week over week, with three quarters of traffic coming from search terms 3 words or less. Long tail visits (4 words or more) did not increase significantly post launch.

Long tail visits did not increase significantly in the week after the launch of Google Instant.

It’s still early and users are still getting used to the new search user experience (although many seem to find Instant distracting and are turning it off) but a little more than a week in it doesn’t appear to be having a significant impact on how users search. We’ll continue to keep a close eye as things develop and will post our findings here.

Are you seeing anything different in the impact Instant has had in your search traffic? Sound off in the comments.

Nathan is the Director of Research at Conductor and leads Conductor’s research and content team. Nathan is a monthly columnist at Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch. Nathan’s research on digital marketing has been widely covered in both industry publications and mainstream media such as Techcrunch, Venture Beat and the Washington Post. Prior to joining Conductor, Nathan was an analyst at Forrester Research.

32 Responses to What’s been the Impact of Google Instant on Searcher Behavior? So far Not Much.

I have the same data from one of the websites that I work on, not as much traffic as you’ve got there, just around 4k daily. Glad to know it’s not just me who have seen the same thing. Business as usual for SEO. 🙂

I am a LITTLE more interested in singular terms. People need to type less to see results. Singular phrases will show results more than before instant. If you search blue widget, you’ll see the results – when you might have (in the past) typed blue widgets.

Thank you, Nathan! Thanks for taking the time to do it right, and thanks for shedding more light than heat, on a topic-gone-mad!

Frankly, I’m surprised the impact seems to be negligent. Never one to think that SEO was “dead”, or even likely to be significantly impacted, I still did expect to see more difference than your numbers indicate.

Again, thanks for the providing us with some real data. I haven’t noticed much of a change in search traffic either as a result of this update.

@Nathan Safran – I think when a really noticeable update like this is released just takes time for people to get used to the changes. If you poll users in another 3 months I bet you’d have some very different numbers.

No actual data here, but I doubt users are actually turning off their “Instant” results. An average user: 1.) wouldn’t know how to do that 2.) wouldn’t go through the trouble of changing that setting.

Brett: good point-I agree most users would not go through the trouble/know how to turn it off. We’ll definitely redo the excersize once some more time has passed-will be interesting to see if little changes because users learn to tune out Instant (like a buzzing fly?) or get used to it and start to find value…

Question: How do you know this? The referrer is still passing the assumed suggestion, regardless of how many characters the user typed. I don’t think you have any way of knowing the influence of Instant because you don’t know if they would have finished the query that way or if the accepted the then default suggestion.

Craig: we know it insofar that the overall distribution of queries remains relatively unchanged post launch. If it skewed long tail or the other way (more shorter queries) we could reasonably conclude something had changed in user behavior as a result of Instant.

Either way we’ll keep an eye on things and report back what we find as more time elapses.

[…] published Monday findings on the impact Google Instant on search behavior and site traffic. The search company studied the search traffic for ten high traffic Web sites across multiple verticals for the week prior to […]

The impact of “Google instant” is not that much high on user experience. Reducing query time is not mean to get most relevant results, user will go for mostly 3 word keyword for getting most related information.

We’ve just done some similar analysis of UK data. Take a look if you like: Google Instant Keyword Data after 12 Days. The only change of note that we spotted was in the 7+ keyword category where there was a noticeable increase. We’re going to do a follow up in a couple of months when we get full roll out to none logged in users and peoples habits have changed. I think its a bit too early to deduced anything concrete.

Thanks very much for the stats! After all the hype around ‘the death of seo’ its encouraging to see some positive stats showing little difference in search trends. I’ll be very interested to see the change (if any) in search trends over the next couple of months whist users become familiar with the concept of Instant search.

Interesting analysis. I agree, though, that it will be important to see if the data will remain consistent over time. I respect, appreciate, and admire your approach and look forward to seeing a followup and other insightful articles.

[…] those results as the user types. At the same time, organic traffic has risen nearly 5% for all. Conductor released the following data showing the impact Google Instant has had on traffic by search term […]

Great post, and it’s right on time if I may add.
With all the buzz around Google Instant launch I’ve encountered too many people declaring that SEO is over and done with. All of them received links to this post 🙂

[…] by Conductor covering over 880,000 visits, search traffic distribution by query length was “virtually identical” the weeks prior to and post launch of Google Instant. A study by MEC had similar […]

[…] Instant’s impact on search behavior. This article is based on blog posts from Conductor (What’s been the Impact of Google Instant on Search Behavior?), SEOmoz (Google Instant: Fewer Changes to SEO than the Average Algo Update) and Distilled’s […]